Generating leads and building a landing page is often the primary goal of many B2B marketing strategies – and almost always a by-product. Even if you are starting small, with short-term goals like social media presence, social growth, and branding, achieving results won’t mean anything if ultimately, in the end, you don’t manage to capture leads and convert people.

Marketing is tough for large enterprises and even tougher for startups on a budget. When certain marketing techniques get overused, they tend to lose the ability to create results. To an extent, this is exactly what happened with certain lead generation tactics, including landing pages.

In many cases, landing pages don’t yield the same results as they used to. Nowadays, in order to get results, you must optimise and build multiple solutions in order to find out what works best. For a startup, this can be expensive. To outsource building a landing page that is functional, user-friendly and effective, it can cost at least £200. However, to find what works for your target audience, you must test a minimum of at least two landing pages and then use the better performing version. It is a costly method that requires a lot of time and effort to get results.

It’s harder if you are a startup and your audience is small and still growing. You may need to activate paid ads on social media to get results. However, help finally has arrived. Since Facebook introduced their lead generation ads and predefined forms, we had our suspicions that LinkedIn may follow suit.

How are lead gen forms better than landing page?

After much anticipation, LinkedIn finally introduced their Lead Gen Forms. And we must say, they are near perfect. The forms are fully customizable with an editable call to action button and data fields that can be used for capturing B2B leads. Also, the lead generation process for the B2B industry has been upgraded, and here’s how:

1. All you need now is a creative graphic designer and content writer. Web designers are not a necessity now – sorry guys.

2. The easier the process, the more time you can dedicate to creating good content.

3. You only need to create two to three LinkedIn ad banners to optimize your campaign.

4. You can manually access your campaign in the campaign manager, analyze performance ratios and optimize it with just a few clicks, simplifying reporting.

5. LinkedIn is now offering a variety of targeting criteria. You can use custom audiences and upload list of emails you already have and target those people, you can target visitors on your site with the tag manager or you can use the standard manual targeting, which is exceptional on LinkedIn.

6. Lead Gen forms have higher conversion rate than a standard landing page. Why? Because it’s fast and easy. People are not redirected to a different page, they will stay on LinkedIn and can access their lead magnet immediately.

Getting the best results with the Lead Gen forms requires split testing. You will know what to do after a week of testing different visuals and text. This timeframe is recommended by LinkedIn as well – the more data you accumulate, the better your insights.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to create maximum impact on a small budget, and get leads fast, then LinkedIn Lead Gen forms are perfect. Linkedin is even great for organic promotion, in one of our previous blogs 3 Ways to Improve Linkedin Engagement we discuss all of the effective tips and tricks you can use to gather better organic engagement.

However, if your goal is to reuse the lead magnet, and the planned lifespan is one year, then a landing page may be a better solution. But for now, automatically jumping to landing pages for a lead generation could be a thing of the past.